Light of the Lamp

 Hi,                   This is the post I wanted to write about for a long time.  Most of the runners who are into long distance running  will have lots of stories to tell. But, only the fellow runners can understand that language which a layman will find it boring.                                                I started my running journey four years ago. The inspiration to start running for fitness was from my husband who is an expert and a fast runner and is highly respected in the running groups. Within few days, I realized that running is not easy and it is going to be a long and struggling journey!! My husband is now an ultra-marathoner and I am yet to run my first full marathon (42 km). I have never been into any kind of sports during my childhood. This makes my journey maybe harder than others, not to say that others are having it easy. Long distance running is a sport that demands lot of time and dedication and for ladies in India who are burdened with daily chores even more, 

 Hi,          I published my last blog post 'Love hate relationship with British monarchy'  exactly 2 months back  but I found this topic lying as a draft from June 24th, unattended. I felt some connect between raagas and dosas but I was wondering how to put them in words.  As a woman, I do cooking. As a Tambrham woman, I've learnt carnatic music in my childhood (something 'mandatory ' for girls in our community to sing before the prospective groom and impress 😂😁).                        I revisited this page after a long time to proceed with this topic. The real learning starts only when we teach and it is true with any field. I started learning more when I started teaching music to children in my neighbourhood. The more I learn, the more I feel that I have learnt nothing. I love dosas just as I love ragas. Just like dosas being my comfort food, listening to Carnatic music everyday and identifying ragas and their characteristics have become my staple food. I don&

 Hi friends,                    As I write this, we are touring Kashmir and Ladakh for 2 weeks and which will come to an end in a couple of days. Of course,  I will be writing about this major trip later.                As we are touring,  we were updated on the news of prominent figures around the world like erstwhile president of USSR Mikhail Gorbachev,  Queen Elizabeth 2, Carnatic vocalist T V Shankaranarayanan who was the nephew of Shri Madhurai Mani Iyer. But as they say, if it rains in Britain, people open their umbrellas all over the world. T V Shankaranarayan's demise made me sad as I had attended his concert recently.                      Queen's death did not affect me much as she had led a long life and one anyone cannot even dream of. Of course,  the news surprised me a bit as I thought she would cross 100 like her queens mother.That their monarchy had colonised many countries in the past and looted the wealth to expand their own empire is still not easy to digest f

 Hello folks,                         I am back after a long time with  yet another travel article.  I love to travel and write on the journeys though most of the time what I do is armchair travel which means I watch lot of travel shows. Forget Pondicherry. There are lot of places around us waiting to be explored which we may miss out seeing in our lifetime.  For me, during my school days, the erstwhile French colonies meant Pondicherry, Mahe, Yanam.  Pondicherry or Pudhucherry was in my bucket list and it was so near yet looked far off. We had been to Chennai from our childhood times but never to this quaint little place.  We had to go to Chennai for an event last month and after that, we headed to Pondicherry which was a smooth 138 km drive on ECR road or East Coast Road from Besant Nagar. It is a very scenic drive with small towns and greenery all the way.  On suggestion of our nephew, we booked  a room in Gratitude Heritage homestay which was housed in an attractive 200 year old Fr

 Hello everyone,                           The word 'grandparents' for every adult usually invokes fond memories of their unconditional love and attachment. Normally,  one has 2 sets of grandparents,  4 sets of great grand parents, 8 sets of great-great grandparents and so on.  In Tamil, we address grandpa  as thatha,  great grand father as 'kollu thatha' , great - great grand father as ' ellu thatha'. The tree starts from parents and spreads out in multiples of 2. It is easy for us to know that there are 2 grandparents for anyone,  as we would have seen and interacted with them during our childhood.  But to imagine that one has 4 great- grandparents becomes a tad difficult.  Depending upon the seniority of a child in a family, one can consider lucky if he/she gets to meet at least 1 or 2 of the great  grandparents.                         From my paternal side, I am one of the last among cousins. But that did not matter much as my paternal grandmother passed aw

 Hi friends, Disclaimer: My article may not be highly factual.        A wonderful new year to all of you.  This time, i would like to write a few words on the fairly new way of supplying cooking gas to the Indian households which is piped gas supply.  When my parents grew up in the post independence era, their families had to be content with laborious cooking on firewood or coal based hearths and kitchens which were blackened by the persistent smoke from the firewood. Slowly, the households in the cities started to use  the single burner, portable kerosene stoves. I am not fully clear about the expenses for these kerosene stoves, but we used to keep one kerosene stove, for which we used to buy kerosene from the ration shops. I still have the smell of the ' infamous kerosene ' in my nostrils when I write this here. 'Infamous ' because it is/or was the favourite fuel in the Indian movies to self immolate or pour on an unfortunate soul to burn them!! Maintaining a kerosene